“Honeymoon?” asked George.

“ Barcelona,” said Ray.

“Nice,” said George, who was briefly unable to remember which country Barcelona was in. “Very nice.”

“Hope so,” said Ray. “Should be a bit cooler that time of year.”

George asked how Ray’s work was going and Ray said they’d taken over a firm in Cardiff which made horizontal machining centers.

And it was all right. George could do the bluff repartee about cars and sport if pressed. But it was like being a sheep in the Nativity play. No amount of applause was going to make the job seem dignified or stop him wanting to run home to a book about fossils.

“They’ve got big clients in Germany. The company were trying to get me to shuttle back and forth to Munich. Knocked that one on the head. For obvious reasons.”

The first time Katie had brought him home, Ray had run his finger along the rack of CDs above the television and said, “So you’re a jazz fan, Mr. Hall,” and George had felt as if Ray had unearthed a stack of pornographic magazines.

Jean appeared at the door. “Are you going to get cleaned and changed before lunch?”

George turned to Ray. “I’ll catch you later.” And he was away, through the kitchen, up the stairs and into the tiled quiet of the lockable bathroom.

5

They hated the idea. As predicted. Katie could tell.

Well, they could live with it. Time was she’d have gone off the deep end. In fact, there was a part of her which missed being the person who went off the deep end. Like her standards were slipping. But you reached a stage where you realized it was a waste of energy trying to change your parents’ minds about anything, ever.

Ray wasn’t an intellectual. He wasn’t the most beautiful man she’d ever met. But the most beautiful man she’d ever met had shat on her from a great height. And when Ray put his arms around her she felt safer than she’d felt for a long time.

She remembered the grim lunch at Lucy’s. The toxic goulash Barry had made. His drunken friend groping her arse in the kitchen and Lucy having that asthma attack. Looking out the window and seeing Ray with Jacob on his shoulders, playing horses, running round the lawn, jumping over the upturned wheelbarrow. And weeping at the thought of going back to her tiny flat with the dead animal smell.

Then he turned up at her door with a bunch of carnations, which freaked her out a bit. He didn’t want to come in. But she insisted. Out of embarrassment, mostly. Not wanting to take the flowers and shut the door in his face. She made him a coffee and he said he wasn’t good at chatting and she asked if he wanted to skip straight to the sex. But it sounded funnier inside her head than out. And in truth, if he’d said, “OK,” she might have accepted just because it was flattering to be wanted, in spite of the bags under her eyes and the Cotswold Wildlife Park T-shirt with the banana stains. But he meant it, about the chatting. He was good at mending the cassette player and cooking fried breakfasts and organizing expeditions to railway museums, and he preferred all of them to small talk.

He had a temper. He’d put his hand through a door toward the end of his first marriage and severed two tendons in his wrist. But he was one of the gentlest men she knew.

A month later he took them up to Hartlepool to visit his father and stepmother. They lived in a bungalow with a garden which Jacob thought was heaven on account of the three gnomes around the ornamental pond and the gazebo thing you could hide in.

Alan and Barbara treated her like the squire’s daughter, which was unnerving till she realized they probably treated all strangers the same way. Alan had worked in a sweet factory for most of his life. When Ray’s mother died of cancer, he started going to the church he’d gone to as a boy and met Barbara who’d divorced her husband when he became an alcoholic (“took to drink” was the phrase she used, which made it sound like Morris Dancing or hedge laying).

They seemed more like grandparents to Katie (though neither of her own grandfathers had tattoos). They belonged to an older world of deference and duty. They’d covered the wall of their living room with photos of Ray and Martin, the same number of each despite the unholy mess Martin had made of his life. There was a small cabinet of china figurines in the dining room and a fluffy U-shaped carpet around the base of the loo.

Barbara cooked a stew, then grilled some fish fingers for Jacob when he complained about the “lumpy bits.” They asked what she did in London and she explained how she helped run an arts festival, and it sounded fey and crapulous. So she told the story of the drunken newsreader they’d booked the previous year, and remembered, just a little bit too late, the reason for Barbara’s divorce and didn’t even manage a graceful change of subject, just ground to an embarrassed halt. So Barbara changed the subject by asking what her parents did and Katie said Dad had recently retired from managing a small company. She was going to leave it there but Jacob said, “Grandpa makes swings,” so she had to explain that Shepherds built equipment for children’s playgrounds, which sounded better than running an arts festival, though not quite as solid as she wished.

And maybe a couple of years ago she’d have felt uncomfortable and wanted to get back to London as fast as possible, but many of her childless London friends were beginning to seem a little fey and crapulous themselves, and it was good to spend time with people who’d brought up children of their own, and listened more than they talked, and thought gardening was more important than getting your hair cut.

And maybe they were old-fashioned. Maybe Ray was old-fashioned. Maybe he didn’t like vacuuming. Maybe he always put the tampon box back into the bathroom cupboard. But Graham did tai chi and turned out to be a wanker.

She didn’t give a toss what her parents thought. Besides, Mum was shagging one of Dad’s old colleagues, and Dad was pretending the silk scarves and the twinkle were all down to her having a new job after thirty years of motherhood and housework. So they weren’t in a position to lecture anyone when it came to relationships.

Jesus, she didn’t even want to think about it.

All she wanted was to get through lunch without too much friction and avoid some grisly woman-to-woman chat over the washing up.

6

Lunch went rather well, right up until dessert.

There was a minor hiccup when George was changing out of his work clothes. He was about to remove his shirt and trousers when he remembered what they were hiding, and felt that horror-film lurch you got when the mirrored door of the wardrobe swung shut to reveal the zombie with the scythe standing behind the hero.

He turned off the lights, pulled down the blinds and showered in darkness singing “ Jerusalem.”

As a result he walked downstairs feeling not only clean but proud of having taken such rapid and effective action. When he reached the dining room there was wine and conversation and Jacob pretending to be a helicopter and George was finally able to loosen his grip a little.

His fear that Jean, being Jean, would make some well-meant but inappropriate comment, that Katie, being Katie, would rise to the bait and that the two of them would proceed to fight like cats proved unfounded. Katie talked about Barcelona (it was in Spain, of course, he remembered now), Ray was complimentary about the food (“Cracking soup, Mrs. Hall”) and Jacob made a runway out of cutlery so his bus could take off and got quite heated when George said that buses did not fly.

They were halfway through the blackberry crumble, however, when the lesion began to itch like athlete’s foot. The word tumor came to mind and it was an ugly word which he did not want to be entertaining, but he was unable to remove it from his head.